ABSTRACT
Nietzsche’s words offer no consolation. Kant denied the possibility of any unambiguous claim to revelation or of any human sense experience of the divine but nevertheless invoked God both as a necessary dialectical illusion and, along with the summum bonum, as a practical presupposition of moral conduct. Schopenhauer subsequently revealed a philosophic vision of a world that was based upon but at variance with Kant’s, destituting us of God but nonetheless stilling our terror with the possibility of a certain kind of redemption. Nietzsche, however, almost alone amongst philosophers, does not seek out the absence of suffering. This he takes to be the mistake of religion.
